Printed indicia which are applied to T-shirts and other articles of clothing are very popular. Several Internet Stores that specialize in printing fanciful indicia such as ornamentation, slogans, college names, or sports team names on T-shirts and other clothing have surged in popularity.
Screen printing is a printing technique whereby a mesh is used to transfer ink onto a substrate, except in areas made impermeable to the ink by a blocking stencil. Registration, as it relates to screen printing, is simply the process of making sure that the design lines up exactly as it should for the print.
It is important to position the screens and secure them properly to make sure every article of clothing gets the same print in the same location. As such, the most critical and time-consuming part of the screen printing process involving multiple colors is the alignment or registration of successive screens. Each screen for each color must be in registration with the other screens to ensure that the various colors do not overlap or are incorrectly spaced. Otherwise, the printed indicia will not be in registration, resulting in a skewed or imperfect indicia. Screens can be manually registered or machine registered.
Traditional machine registered multicolor screen printing uses machines with multiple print heads (1 for each color). They also have multiple printing arms (receivers). A traditional screen registration device uses a 2-3 point registration device that attaches to the receiver arm. This device must be moved (rotated) under each print head. Screens are manually placed against the registration points and then locked by the frame holder attached to the print head. This process must be repeated for each color of a print job at each print head. It must also be repeated for each individual print job. It would therefore be useful to provide a registration device that attaches to the print heads rather than the printing arm/receiver to allow all screens of a print job to be simultaneously registered.